We have eaten at Perkins Cove Kitchen several times in the past few years when visiting Ogunquit both in the summer and in the fall. When traveling with my family and my parents last year, my mother cited it as her favorite meal over the whole weekend.
This is what makes this next part so very difficult.
As a former line cook and private chef, I have been in the food industry for the better part of three decades. I know how difficult the industry can be. I know there are off nights. It happens. But this was something else.
We ate here on a Saturday night over Columbus Day weekend. It was one of the worst meals that I have had in a very long time. It was so frustrating to have one of our favorite places in Ogunquit be so spectacularly terrible.
The place was full of people and had a great vibe.
It is one thing to have a terrible meal, it is another to pay so much money for such a horrific experience.
Each member of our party ordered appetizers and entrees. My father orders oysters, and they arrived LONG before any of the other appetizers did. My wife and I both ordered the soup special. It tasted pretty good, but it came out at room temperature. We told the waitress, and she took them back into the kitchen. If I had to guess, they probably just put them in a microwave for 30 seconds and then then brought them back out to us. The bottom of the bowls were now very hot, but the actual soup was still lukewarm, at best.
My son had the meatball appetizer, which he loved. The waitress also brought out my crab cakes . . . they were room temperature and served on a bed of mixed greens. There was pink liquid all over the plate and on the edges. Underneath the cab cakes was a "slaw" of some kind made with either red cabbage or raw red beets. It was terrible and the plate looked like a child had been tossing the items with no regard for actual presentation.
My mother ordered the "fall" Caesar salad.
Appetizers were cleared, and then suddenly my son's Mac and cheese was delivered to the table. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp for a long time . . . the top layer of pasta was dried out and when we mixed it from the bottom of the bowl there was sauce. It was not like anything that anyone would recognize as Mac and cheese. It was more like pasta with way too much black pepper and not enough béchamel. It was utterly terrible. Unfortunately, my mother also ordered the Mac and cheese. She ate one bite and gave up.
We waited a very long time until the rest of the meals were served. The inability of the kitchen to actually time out the meal was what you would expect from an opening night with a staff who had never worked together, not a top flight restaurant in a vacation town.
And then came the salads that my wife and I ordered for our entrees. She had the fall salad . . . there was a fistful of smoked gouda (or some other cheese like that) that was just dropped on the plate. She left the pile on the side after eating around it.
I ordered the "beet and pear tower" . . . I cannot imagine how someone put this dish together and thought it was a good idea. It was the same "bed" of greens that came with the crab cake, and there was a five or six inch tall stack of sliced beets and pear with a skewer driven through the middle of it. There was also a handful of walnuts that had been roasted with some kind of cinnamon/sugar dusting. I tried to cut into the tower and my knife would not cut through the first slice of beet or the pear slices. I pulled out the skewer to separate it and take a second shot . . . the top beet slice was almost raw and crunchy. The pear slice was a cross section of the pear that still had the core with seeds in the middle, and it was so unripe that it was like eating a slice of wood with little to no actual pear flavor. No dressing at all on the "salad". Why not pair a little goat cheese with your beet salad? That has been a classic for decades.
The crowning touch was the "grilled" shrimp that I added to my salad for $12. There were three shrimp. I would guess the they 26-30 or 31-40 sized shrimp. They had no color on them at all, and had more of the texture of poorly poached shrimp than anything else.
I left my plate mostly untouched. When the waitress asked it I wanted it boxed up I said, "No thanks."
A few minutes later the chef came out and made the rounds of the tables to ask how the meals were . . . If a waitress brings back an entire salad that was untouched, you already know the answer.
We were all horrified by the experience here. My parents are in their mid-80's. We have been coming to Ogunquit for forty-five years together. What a lost opportunity to have a great moment with them. How many more will we have left?
I love restaurants like no other place. This experiences left me filled with sadness and frustration.
After we dropped my parents off at the hotel, my son and I went to Cornerstone and had pizza. It was great. read more